A CANADIAN PERSPECTIVE ON OUTSIDER ART

The outsider artist – Madonna or whore?

I’ve been having a lively exchange with Canadian artist, Leigh Cooney. (More about Cooney in another blog.) The discussion began with a question about how he categorizes his art. (He has taken himself off the “outsider” list and placed himself in the “Pop Folk” category.) Do artists label their own work, or is that something imposed by others? This led to a discussion about the “purity test” for outsider artists.

One of my first blogs was about who is “outside” and who is not, and it seems that I am still wrestling with that fundamental question.

Who is a “pure” outsider – a Madonna – in the world of commercial art? They used to be only those poor souls locked up in mental institutions, but now they walk among us. The editors of Raw Vision support the purist view. They regret the use of the “outsider artist” label to just anyone who is self-taught. It’s not about clumsiness or naiveté. Outsider art, they say, is “synonymous with Art Brut in both spirit and meaning, to that rarity of art produced by those who do not know its name.”

Here’s the conundrum. As Cooney points out, the purposes of outsider art fairs and galleries are to bring attention to the work of outsider artists, living or dead. But does plucking outsider artists from obscurity cause them to lose the purity and naiveté that made them outsiders in the first place? Are pure outsider artists only those who don’t know they are outsider artists? What happens when others scrutinize their work and tell them they are real artists?

And then there are the bad boys (and girls) of the outsider art world, like Joe Coleman. Coleman is one of the BIG success stories in the outsider art world. He is well known, prolific, produces remarkable art, and is very, very good at marketing his work. He used to be an outsider before he was stripped of his title. He had been exhibiting at the Outsider Art Fair in NYC for 6 years. Then, in 2003, he was barred from the fair because it was discovered he had done a stint at art school (actually, he was thrown out), thereby removing him from the self-taught category. Coleman has another version of the story. He says he was ostracized for being “too aware of the whole business process of selling” his work. “They seem to want to promote an art in which they’re dealing with people who are either emotionally or physically incapable of protecting themselves. Or dead.” Writer, Jesse Walker, notes that Coleman is not the only artist in the fair with such a background. Alex Grey, for example, teaches art!

I like the way Walker has summed up the controversy:

The conflict is important for a different reason: because it exposes certain assumptions about “primitive” art. One reason outsider art is increasingly popular is because it seems so unmediated, as though it tumbled directly from the creator’s mind onto the canvas. The discovery that the creator actually guided its fall with some skills—skills, worse yet, that he deliberately honed—can feel like a betrayal, at least for those who’ve romanticized the artist as an untutored primitive without any self-awareness.

Do outsider artists turn into whores of the art world when they achieve recognition through marketing? Not necessarily. Not unless they take the next step and start pandering to their audience. We have enough artists who produce paintings to match the couch. They are the ones, in my opinion, who have sold their souls for fortune and fame.